DWi-P supports the pedestrian life of Lower Manhattan through sound and movement. DWi-P offers the sound of WaTER, supported by stairs, walkways, and ramps through a transparent community building that welcomes Lower Manhattan visitors to Battery Park City. Sound and a green roof permeated by stairs, ramps and walkways, link the Battery Park City Ballfields to North End Avenue through DWi-P’s WaTER façade: a unique digital artwork, activated through cellphone technologies.

DWi-P’s façade makes an edge to the Murray-Warren Passage, a new parkway link between Murray and Warren Streets. Visitors to DWi-P can walk along the Passage, adjacent to the inscribed score, or move up through the building, using exterior stairs and ramps built into the facade. hMa Principal Meyers catalogs DWi-P and hMa’s collaboration with composer M.J. Schumacher in her recently published book, Shape of Sound (May 2014, Artifice Books London).

DWi-P’s internal program continues the theme of water: the pool room and swim program are the principal program areas in the building. DWi-P is operated by Asphalt Green, an organization that specializes in teaching swimming. Graduates of the program have participated with U.S. Olympic Swim Teams. The program includes visits by previous Olympic team members.

Won Buddhist Retreat is another hMa project with Sound and Movement as part of an overall architectural program. The Won Buddhist Retreat emphasizes sound through a program where sound is programmed. The meditation hall is programmed for silence; other areas are designated for conversation.

At Won Buddhist Retreat, programmed movement is determined through walking paths, courtyards, and shaped roofs. Walking paths include predetermined paths through residential and public courtyards, for silent meditation; and nature paths through meadows, from the residential areas to the public domain of meditation hall and visitor’s center.

04/01/2015

Above: Research: Woven Fabric: the operation of taking a photograph of a face, and fracturing it into fragments. The lines that crack the image of the face apart, make a weave, and the weave takes on an equal interest to the original image. It was this approach, of finding a way to 'weave' fragments of parks through the Battery Park City North Neighborhood, that guided hMa's approach and our research into how to design a large urban neighborhood in New York City.

Above: Location maps of the area of Battery Park City where hMa created the master plan for the North Neighborhood.

Above: Diagrams of hMa's approach to their urban design approach at the North Neighborhood - where we start with a complete figure that is being tested by a set of woven forces, and then the resulting condition we came to, where hMa creates a woven fabric for the neighborhood.

To walk you through hMa's project, we will begin at the North Neighborhood dog park, located at the center of North End Avenue, and proceed south, to the Irish Hunger Memorial - a built intervention that is at once a memorial to the Irish famine (by Brooklyn artist Brian Tolle), and also - a park, and also - a building (the hunger library by 1100 Architect).

Above: a view of Nelson Rockefeller Park. This is a park that functions much like the face where we started : as a series of woven green zones that runs the full length of the North Neighborhood, from North to South.

Above: a typical image from Teardrop Park, a park located very near the center of the North Neighborhood. This is a park designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, in collaboration with hMa. The decision was to move huge boulders from upstate New York in order to recreate the sensibility of the original Manhattan landscape, prior to the European settlement, and development, of the Island.

Directly across from Teardrop Park, is the building and Park designed by hMa: DWi-P. Above: hMa's DWi-P facade, an elevation that edges a a walkway devised by hMa, linking Murray and Warren Streets, the Murray-Warren Passage.

Above: Materiality of the park at DWi-P: a steel handrail edges hMa's ramp, which leads to the roof of DWi-P, which is also a park, where parents can watch their kids playing ball at the BPC Ballfields. A wood trellis marks the top edge of the DWi-P roof.

DWi-P: a park that is dedicated to moving, walking, thinking. The glass facade has an embedded sound piece by New York composer Michael J. Schumacher: WaTER.

03/19/2015

In 2014, Brooklyn based artist Bruce Pearson invited hMa to collaborate with him, and to develop a concept for an architectural armature for Fractal form, with a Text-based formal investigation. The image above shows one of Bruce Pearson's paintings of text, based on fractal form. The painting above is a 4' x 6' fractal rendition of the words: 'Relationships Physics Sleep Tragedy and Plant Life'. Pearson simultaneously sculpts his paintings into fractal form in blue foam, and then paints the same text, again in a fractal format, shifted, on top of the original bas-relief text.

Above, a photograph of Bruce Pearson, next to his painting, Encyclopedia III. Bruce explains his work as splicing text into visual compositions. His paintings feature hundreds of fragments, with his texts woven through the fragments. In 2014, Bruce invited hMa to collaborate on a 3-dimensional version of one of his texts.

The hMa - Pearson collaboration is a system of design based on mathematical form. I am showing, above, hMa's plan for the sculpture, based on two interwoven spirals, next to hMa's model, or maquette, for the final sculpture. 'On-In Landscape' will be 8' tall, with a plan based on an algorithmic degeneration of a circle - two interwoven spirals 8' tall, laser-cut in steel.

We started our collaboration with Pearson's drawing of his text: 'Contains Real Hard Won Insight' - a series of letters broken into fractal forms.

The project involved finding a way to construct an architectural armature, capable of supporting fractal forms, without disrupting the experience of the fractals, or the text.

Above: hMa's maquette, or model, of the sculpture, as a 9-square grid.

Pearson Studio's 3-D model of the project, with a scale human figure. hMa's work is very involved with the concept of 'walking, moving, and thinking' - as the primary experience of Architecture. We overlaid this over Pearson's fragmented text.

Above: the Pearson - hMa collaboration, as it appeared at Pearson's one-man show, at Feldman Gallery in 2014.

03/16/2015

The title of my Talk : Silence, Lines, Woven Operations, and Fractals. These are operations that make architecture.Lines and fractals speak to mathematics. Mathematics is basic to Architecture. In the Medieval Era, Architects participated in guilds. Guilds passed knowledge about building, based on sacred geometries, from generation to generation. They used knowledge about geometry and stone to build structures – Cathedrals - that we would be unable to build as stone-masonry today.

Silence and Woven Operations - speak to my Philosophical position of design. I prefer to be ‘Silent’, but thoughtful, in my use of materials, mathematics, and form.I foster ‘silence’ in my work by using ‘woven operations’ to make buildings that blend into environments.

SEMPER: In order to achieve Mathematical and philosophical Goals as architects hMa uses a series of Tools: I am presenting 6 Tools, represented by the letters : S E M P E R.

- By creating open conversations through concrete tube connectors between floors - at Infinity Chapel.

Education – Architecture is ‘Education’. Medieval cathedrals were historical chronicles of towns where they were built. Contemporary architecture is, likewise, a chronicle of modern life.

Research - In a fast changing world - it requires constant research for architects to maintain a relevant Practice.

I want to go into Greater Detail about Each of these Operations

Infinity Chapel - Geometrically formed series of surfaces designed to frame light. The surfaces reference an idea about the 4th Dimension (time) through ts form (hyper-cube), and through the movement of daylight. The Chapel is a series of spherical shapes set within a rectangular building envelop.

The Chapel design includes ‘Sound and Light Wells’ - concrete boxes - that connect a street-level Chapel and Reading Room to a Basement Sunday School below. They also mark a path - from MacDougal Street, through a Reading Room, to the Chapel.

‘Sound and light wells’ cut through the floor of the building, and connect the entire compound visually, and through sound.

In contrast to the Dynamic nature of Infinity Chapel hMa’s Won Buddhist Meditation Hall is designed for stillness, underlined by Silence. The Won Buddhists requested a program of Silence for a simple rectangular building for Meditation.

On the same site, hMa designed four dynamic buildings with fractal roofs where architecture uses the dynamism of fractal form to sponsor walking meditation through landscape.

‘Systems’ – can include Game Theory. Games sponsor movement.

This shows John Cage a Composer, and Marcel Duchamp, a Visual Artist, possibly the two most important Artists of the 20th Century - playing chess. Duchamp and Cage saw Chess as a way of understanding the world through an aesthetic system – a series of decisions related to program - governed by the cartesian grid –

Chess, like architecture, demands that whoever plays has the ability to calculate the ramifications of movement through space, several steps ahead. I love the work of Duchamp also because I love his concept of ‘Infrathin’, and its application to Space and Spatial systems of Design. I love Cage’s sound creations - a body of work based on a counter-point to the idea of ‘Silence’.

These 2 concepts – Infrathin - or Infinitely thin space;and Silence - have reverberated through my work as an architect.

Contemporary artists use systems to generate algorithmic interpretations of materials and space. At MIT, Skylar Tibbitts and his SJET Lab - create self-Assembling- programmable objects with the potential to redefine our concept of sculpture, materials, and construction. Tibbits is stretching the limits of art and space - to include infinite variations of program and materiality through his application of mobility and movement to materials

This is a Project I will return to in Greater Detail: ‘Contains Real Hard Won Insight’ - a Text-based Sculpture to be built out of laser-cut steel and a collaboration between hMa and Bruce Pearson. Bruce is an Artist whose paintings embed hidden text within complex, fractal forms.

In our collaboration, the Text is constructed as an 8’ high steel spiral in the landscape. You walk a dynamic double spiral path and the experience is activated, simultaneously, by reading, and being embedded within, a text. In addition, the text itself – is embedded within a system of fractal shapes and the fractals have an equivalent importance to the text.

Movement through the piece is active through the dynamic shape of the walk ; the fractal form of Bruce’s art; and the text itself.

The spiral is in contrast to the horizontal, static nature of a Line, demonstrated by another project I will return to: Bridge - Studio. In this case a Linear Wood Frame building is a linear bridge, used as a writing and painting studio. The concept was to fabricate a Line or Plane in landscape.

A line is ‘zero’ - because it has no thickness - but is also Infinite – because it extends in both directions without end.

11/22/2014

Victoria Meyers and her new book Shape of Sound are featured in a new post on Life.Style.Design. The Art of Living. Check out the post: http://www.lifestyledesignexperience.com/shape-of-sound/.

The post includes texts from Meyers's 2014 Shape of Sound, as well as her 2006 book, Designing with Light.

Designing with Light, Victoria Meyers architect

The piece describes Meyers as a visionary exploring sound as a medium to expand contemporary space design. Meyers has been at the forefront of using sound in hMa projects, since 2006, with the installation of 'Sound and Light Wells' in hMa's Infinity Chapel, located near Washington Square in the Greenwich Village area of New York City.

Meyers' latest foray into complex architectural design incorporating sound includes hMa's DWi-P located at Battery Park City, in NYC. DWi-P features a 550-foot long glass facade with embedded blue-tooth technology to support visitors reading the facade using cell phones. The facade is imprinted with a sound-score by NYC Composer Michael J. Schumacher, who is also the Founder and Executive Director of Diapason Gallery in Brooklyn.

DWi-P is a new Community Center at Battery Park City designed to welcome visitors from the World Trade Center Memorial Site to the parks at Battery Park City. The building, which houses a series of pools to support the swimming programs of Asphalt Green, has a composition embedded in the facade titled: WaTER.

Meyers recently presented hMa's works at FIU (Florida International University) in Miami, where she was hosted by Professor David Rifkind. Meyers's lecture, titled SEMPER (system, energy, materiality, program, education, research) reviewed hMa's works, including the founding principals' (Meyers and Hanrahan) dedication to education as part of their approach to design, architecture, landscapes, and master plans.

07/19/2013

For the past twenty years, I have crafted an architectural and urban design practice (hanrahan Meyers architects) that includes sound as a formal element of the designed environment. Music is the art of sound, and architecture is the art of building. Shape of Sound is an attempt to catalogue the cross-fertilization between sound and architecture, and how these two disciplines unite to generate a unique hybrid practice.

I began using sound as part of my architectural practice in 1995, when I developed a concept for a museum installation titled Sampling. Sampling was proposed to the San Francisco Museum of Art, and included works by sound artistsStephen Vitiello and DJ Olive; visual artists Bruce Pearson and Roxy Paine; and works from hMa, my architectural practice. Contemporary art, architecture, and sound are deeply concerned with sampling and samples. Contemporary architects, visual artists, and sound artists use ‘samples’ as operative tools to create post-modern representations of contemporary culture.

Since 2002 I have collaborated with the composer and sound artist Michael Schumacher (www.michaeljschumacher.com). You can see Michael’s work if you look at the cover of this book. My firm, hanrahan Meyers architects (hMa) commissioned Michael to develop a score for our building, DWi-P (Digital Water i-Pavilion), and we etched Michael’s score for his composition (WaTER) onto the building’s glass façade. You can hear Michael’s score through the DWi-P App, or by visiting the SoS web page: www.shapeofsound.us.

Sound is a mechanical wave that translates from our ears to our brains as sound. It may seem curious that someone who works in the highly visual media of architecture and urban design would develop a body of work that uses sound - an invisible energy wave - as a focal point. When architectural form is used to frame a phenomenon, and renders it, in this case, sound, ‘visible’: a visceral link is created between the spaces that we occupy, and our experience of the world.

I met Stephen Vitiello, whose piece, ‘A Bell for Every Minute’, animated the High Line project in New York City, when Stephen and I worked on the ‘Sampling’ show. We have continued our dialogue about the effects of sound in the environment ever since. You can see Stephen’s work, which is critical to this book, in the chapters on Sound Urbanism (pages 80 – 81), and Sound Art (pages 117 – 123).

hMa also collaborated with sound artist Jane Philbrick on an architectural and sound installation for Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, New York. Vox Harbour was a spoken word installation in a waterfront park that included the construction of three ‘listening and speaking’ stations. The stations were wood shells designed by hMa to capture sound within naturalistic, bio-morphically shaped ‘talking’ booths. The booths were designed for users to stand in and speak (single users). Words were recorded and overlaid by words spoken by prior participants. The concept was to capture multiple recordings representing the broad cultural heritage of Queens.

Shape of Sound and Designing with Light: a series connection

Prior to Shape of Sound, I published Designing with Light in 2006. DwL included research on light by Dr. Lene Hau, from Harvard’s Physics Department; sound works by composers Arvo Part and John Cage; videos by artist Bill Viola; and light art by Dan Flavin. All of these practitioners had developed artistic and scientific works that were, on the one hand, relevant to their particular media, but also, at the same time, addressed to the issue of how light affects space.

Shape of Sound was planned to follow the methods of inquiry set forth by DwL. Architecture is an art where all of the senses are engaged. SoS is a book that looks at sound as an objective, formal element of design, using methods of critique and investigation, similar to the critical methods used to study light in DwL.

Perception and Sound Waves

Our perception of the sounds that we hear changes over time, and is directly related to the contemporary technologies of any given place and/or time. The sound of a Medieval village was very different from the sound of a town with factories during the industrial era. Our contemporary sound perception of the city is highly displaced through the on-going dialogue that smart phone users hear through their headsets.

The sound of the city today is more of a hum than the grinding of factories from the industrial age, but we also have cars everywhere, and airplanes overhead. There are a lot of sounds, in addition to the sounds of nature. SoS is an attempt to isolate and critically evaluate many of those sounds, and make them a conscious part of the design discussion about the city and the building.

Contemporary experience of Sound

Our contemporary sense of sound is conditioned by digital technologies. The generation coming of age grew up listening to the world through headphones. This generation hears the world differently than prior generations, and part of what this book looks at is this very difference. hMa explores that difference in particular in our recently completed DWi-P project (Digital Water i-Pavilion) at Battery Park City.

Walls are a traditional element of the language of architecture. Columns and walls are the basic language of architecture taught in the first year of architectural design studies. Our perception of walls changes radically, however, if they become ‘green screens’ for the projection of imagery and sound. This book begins to touch on recent digital innovations, as we move toward intelligent walls that respond to human interactions assisted through biologic and electronic sensory systems. The emergence of intelligent systems, manifest in interactive electronic and biological interfaces that interact with building users, is changing the experience of our physical environment.

The object of our interaction with the built environment is no longer the materiality of walls and surfaces. The critical focus of architecture and urban design is becoming the continuous and interactive surface of web-based information.

Iannis Xenakis, Le Corbusier, and the Phillips Pavilion : Precursors of where we are today

The work of structural engineer and composer Iannis Xenakis, composer Edgar Varese, and architect Le Corbusier at the Phillips Pavilion has been a strong influence on contemporary design. As architecture faces the rapidity of contemporary technological advancements, I would reference readers to the Phillips Pavilion, which was, in its day, a prescient and futuristic example of the sort of interactive wall surfaces that we are beginning to see constructed in public spaces today.

Singularity

We face a singular moment in history. Architecture is searching for new points of reference as a response to the disintegration of its material form through the sensory experiences of the Internet and digital media. My idea with Shape of Sound was to explore this edge, and to comment on where we stand today, with respect to these various and differential forms of media and knowledge as they interact with and alter our perception of the physical world.

05/05/2013

Process: Duchamp: Framed Glass. This refers to architects hMa's process (Victoria Meyers architect) in designing DWi-P : Digital Water i-Pavilion. The building was designed around ideas about how glass can have a presence that exceeds its physical thickness. The thickness can be determined through its intellectual ideas, which can greatly exceed the physicality of the glass thicnkess. In the case of Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass, that thickness was processed and presented as a physical rendering of Einstein's Theory of Relativity, cut into the glass surface. In the case of hMa's WaTER wall, that thickness could be seen as an exposition about the thickness of current ideas about physicality, as related to digital technologies; and the presentation of a social critique about the increasing scarcity of clean water, even as the world's water levels rise, due to melting ice caps.

In both cases: hMa's glass wall, as well as the Duchamp glass, the result was Physics, but also a social critique, written in (on) glass. These critiques and their 'thicknesses', increase the intellectual thickness of the glass.

hMa's ideas about sound and space, are applied to buildings, as well as to urban spaces. As master plan architects for Battery Park City's North Neighborhood, hMa overviewed the development of over one-million square feet of LEED certified green construction. We also overviewed the development of a park system that was linked together by a concept hMa describes as : woven space, as well as by sound, in the installation (not yet achieved) by Ann Hamilton in Teardrop Park, in the Water Wall at Teardrop Park, and in hMa's digitally interactive wall, at DWi-P.

Above: Teardrop Park. This project was conceived as a collaboration between hMa, Michael van Valkenburgh, and the artist, Ann Hamilton.

Above: Woven Fabric: hMa conceived the site plan of BPC's North Neighborhood as a 'woven fabric'. This fabric consisted of a series of parks and buildings that weave together as a single physical fabric, both in terms of their Green Construction, but also by offering several occupiable Green Roofs for public use, including the Irish Hunger Memorial by artist Brian Tolle (below) as well as hMa's Green Roof over their building, DWi-P, publicly accessible from North End Avenue.

11/15/2012

Victoria Meyers architect working with hMa developed a plan for Battery Park City's North Neighborhood, using a concept of 'social networks' to organize the spaces in their master plan. The plan above shows all of the green roofs, connected.

Trees were a big part of the Battery Park City North Neighborhood plan. The idea of planting trees crossed over to Mayor Bloomberg's PLANYC, with their plan to plant one million trees. At Battery Park City's North Neighborhood, hMa overviewed the development of Green Streets, with planted areas to reduce rain water run-off, and including trees.

An isometric view of hMa's master plan for Battery Park City's North Neighborhood, next to a diagram for Bloomberg's PLANYC.

In 2009, Joseph Beuys started his plan to plant 7,000 oak trees. This project was the beginning of Beuys' political project, of starting the Green Movement in Germany.

Pearson and Victoria Meyers have discussed issues about the arts, culture, architecture, and public space since the mid-1990's, when Victoria Meyers invited Mr. Pearson to several reviews and juried conversations at Columbia University'sGSAPP. At that time, Ms. Meyers was the Graduate School Coordinator at Columbia's GSAPP.

The conversation between Bruce Pearson and Victoria Meyers concerned ways that Mr. Pearson's painterly sculptures could be integrated into complex urban spaces. Ms. Meyers responded by developing the above sculptural intervention for Mr. Pearson's art, in Battery Park City's North Neighborhood, where her firm, hMa are the Master Plan architects.

The resulting collaborative work, shown above, is a piece developed by Pearson and Meyers, working in collaboration. The text piece, 'Contains Real Hard Won Insight' is a text by Pearson. The piece was developed by Ms. Meyers and Mr. Pearson, with the idea of placing Pearson's text within a public space, while allowing visitors to walk through the text. The piece is imagined as an 8' high painted steel, free-standing text labrynth.

The piece draws on ideas that Meyers had been developing in her practice, of porous urbanism. The text sculpture puts visitors to the piece within a written text, while being porous and allowing them to remain within the urban context of downtown New York City.

The text and the sculptural development also draws upon Meyers's investigations into sound, light and natural phenomena. Shown above are Meyers' designs for the 'LightScore', performed at the Kitchen space for sound and media, as well as her design for DWi-P, a new 65,000 square foot community center scheduled to open in 2013.

Books by hMa

Victoria Meyers: Designing With Light
New York Architects Victoria Meyers and Thomas Hanrahan believe that architecture is an environment, 'pure space', manifested in nature. The principals of hanrahanMeyers architects (hMa) have established themselves as unique visionaries, incorporating light and sound into their arresting designs of pure forms. Founded in 1987, the firm specializes in residences, art centers, and community spaces. They design spaces from a vision that connects visitors with the natural world.
www.designingwithlight.us

The Conservation FundAs part of our nature based vision for architecture, hMa gives a percentage of the firm’s annual revenues to nature initiatives. This year, hMa funded ‘Wildlife Corridors’, through the Conservation Fund. ‘Wildlife Corridors’ provide natural zones through cities and towns that link animals with adjacent nature preserves. This initiative is one of several cutting-edge planning initiatives that forward thinking architects will be adopting as we seek to harmonize human habitats with nature and create sustainable development.